School Information System
Newsletter Sign Up |

Subscribe to this site via RSS: | Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas

February 9, 2014

Is Math a Young Man's Game?

Jordan Ellenberg:

Last month at MIT, mathematician Grigori Perelman delivered a series of lectures with the innocuous title "Ricci Flow and Geometrization of Three-Manifolds." In the unassuming social universe of mathematics, the equally apt title "I Claim To Be the Winner of a Million-Dollar Prize" would have been considered a bit much. Perelman claims to have proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture, a daring assertion about three-dimensional spaces that implies, among other things, the truth of the century-old Poincaré conjecture. And it's the Poincaré conjecture that, courtesy of the Clay Foundation, carries a million-dollar bounty. If Perelman is correct--and many in the field would bet his way--he's made a major and unexpected breakthrough, brilliantly using the tools of one field to attack a problem in another.

There's only one problem with this story. Perelman is almost 40 years old.

In most people's minds, a 40-year-old man is as likely to be a productive mathematician as he is to be a major league center fielder or an interesting rock musician. Mathematical progress is supposed to occur not through decades of experience and toil but all at once, in a numinous blaze, to a born genius. Think of the young John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, discovering the Nash equilibrium in a smoky bar where his less precocious classmates think they're just picking up coeds, or the aged mathematician in Proof who "revolutionized the field twice before he was twenty-two."

It's not hard to see where the stereotype comes from; the history of mathematics is strewn with brilliant young corpses. Evariste Galois, Gotthold Eisenstein, and Niels Abel--mathematicians of such rare importance that their names, like Kafka's, have become adjectives--were all dead by 30. Galois laid down the foundations of modern algebra as a teenager, with enough spare time left over to become a well-known political radical, serve a nine-month jail sentence, and launch an affair with the prison medic's daughter; in connection with this last, he was killed in a duel at the age of 21. The British number theorist G.H. Hardy, in A Mathematician's Apology, one of the most widely read books about the nature and practice of mathematics, famously wrote: "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 9, 2014 1:31 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?